As the demand for more innovative products to help improve the lives of others increases, the product design industry continues to require more effective design methodologies. It has been a long held belief that Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a tool to be used for detailed design, and not appropriate for use during the conceptual design phase of the product design/engineering process. Reasons for this finding include the propensity of CAD tools to cause designers’ premature concept fixation, design detail focus, and depth based vs. breadth based design. However, given the rapid advances in CAD software, cloud-computing and real-time synchronous collaboration in recent years, the ability to quickly digitally prototype unique concepts in CAD has never been easier. This study revisits the question of suitability of CAD for conceptual design (Conceptual CAD), with the specific consideration of age of the designer; we test whether a dichotomy exists between perceptions of conceptual CAD usage in younger designers who are more digitally inclined, and older designers who did not begin their careers immersed in digital design tools. 

 

The study begins with a review of the body of existing literature which cautions against the use of CAD as a tool for conceptual design. Next, a survey of professional product designers (spanning a variety of networks including LinkedIn and local product design think-tanks) is conducted. The survey focuses on the analysis of differences in Conceptual CAD usage by a variety of factors (years of CAD experience, industry of practice, role, amount of time spent performing team vs. individual design actions, etc.) with the goal of identifying if correlation exists between designer age and inclination to use Conceptual CAD. Our study reveals that newly graduated and junior engineers (part of the “digital natives” generation), have advanced comfort and abilities with digital tools, and thus possess a corresponding proclivity to perform Conceptual CAD, contrary to conventional wisdom in the design research community. These preferences benefit from the features of modern CAD tools, including fast collaboration and sharing. Furthermore, from an industrial product development perspective, the ability of modern CAD tools to perform downstream engineering analyses of designs (i.e. Finite Element Analyses, Failure Modes Effects Analyses, Generative Design, Manufacturing Quotations, etc.) can help significantly expedite decision making of design teams for downstream detailed design decisions. We discuss important implications of these findings on the way we teach and study CAD in engineering design curricula. As well, a series of recommendations and next steps are generated from the findings of this research to motivate changes to the current state of best practices for CAD usage in industrial settings and global-scale product development. 


Revisiting the Suitability of Conceptual Design With Computer-Aided Design Tools With a Generational Lens

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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